This is why we can’t have nice things.
Locals know that Dolores Park is the place to go in the city when the weather is beautiful. Perks include picnics, day drinking, lawn games, and sitting around shooting the shit with friends. Lately, though, all that’s changed. Since closing part of the park for renovations, there’s less space for people to lounge but apparently just enough for ne’er-do-wells to trash everything. In fact, the city spends $400K per year just cleaning up the park.
According to SF Gate, “there are eight 96-gallon ‘toters’…twenty 30-gallon cans…and a six cubic yard debris box (enough to fill three pickup trucks)” emptied twice a day at the park. Given that DP can accommodate as many as 10,000 visitors on a good day, it’s not surprising that those cans fill up quickly and overflow. Some visitors report that the cans are left full overnight.
Blame also falls on those who ravage the cans after dark, either foraging for food or cans and bottles. Everything from leftover food, empty cups, beer cans, liquor bottles, and broken glass litter the grassy knoll, as well as the area fenced off for renovations. And don’t even get me started on the drug paraphenilia that’s found out there on the regular.
In one particularly egregious incident last month, a pair of teenagers broke into the park, hot-wired a construction vehicle, and did doughnuts on the newly sodded turf. Their vandalism cost $100,000 and delayed the park’s reopening indefinitely. And over the weekend, pretty much the whole city was appalled to hear that assholes scattered broken glass in the children’s sandbox. That damage will take the city a week to remove and require trucking in 20 tons of fresh sand.
Here’s a friendly reminder: Anywhere you go should be a “pack in, pack out, and leave no trace” kind of deal. Let’s start practicing what we preach, San Francisco.
[via SF Gate; photo courtesy of SharonaGott/Flickr]
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